Bari, Italy · November 8, 1943 In this date in 1943, 13 U.S. Army flight nurses, 13 young enlisted medics, and 3 flight crew boarded a Douglas C‑53 transport in Sicily for a 90‑minute flight to Bari on the Italian mainland. As a unit of the 807th Medical Air Evacuation Squadron, the team’s assignment was to…
Leyte, Philippines · October 20, 1944 In October 1944 Lt. Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita commanded 225,000 Japanese soldiers in the Philippines. On this date in 1944, on a 25‑mile stretch of Leyte Island in the Philippines, an Allied fleet of more than 730 transport and escort vessels, supported by aircraft carriers and 100 warships, put 160,000 U.S. troops…
Washington, D.C. · September 8, 1939 On this date in 1939, eight days after Nazi Germany invaded neighboring Poland and triggered World War II in Europe, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared a state of “limited national emergency.” The underfunded and undermanned U.S. military forces were strengthened, and the next year Congress provided major military budget increases, which…
Kyūshū Island, Japan · August 25, 1945 On this date in 1945, ten days after Japan had agreed to unconditional surrender, two U.S. Army pilots flying P‑38 Lightnings on armed reconnaissance landed on Kyūshū Island, the southernmost Japanese Home Island, after one of the P‑38s ran low on fuel. The two pilots became the first…
Fort William Henry Harrison, Helena, Montana · July 9, 1942 On this date in 1942 the First Special Service Force was activated as a joint U.S.-Canadian force. Regarded as parents of the U.S. Green Berets, the United States Special Operations Command, and the Canadian Special Operations Forces Command, these volunteers were the shock troops of…
Aboard Admiral Spruance’s Flagship USS Indianapolis · April 1, 1945 For weeks the largest Allied fleet since D‑Day—nearly 1,500 U.S. and British vessels—fired 2.3 million shells onto Okinawa, the largest island in the Ryukyu archipelago and a little more than 300 miles/483 km from Kyūshū and Shikoku, the southernmost Japanese Home Islands. Kyūshū and Shikoku were home to many…
Oppenheim, Germany · March 22, 1945 On this date in 1945, one day before the British 21st Army Group under Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery was due to launch Operation Plunder, the long-awaited northern offensive across the Rhine River at Rees and Wesel in North Rhine-Westphalia, Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., sneaked a division of…
Anzio, Italy · February 16, 1944 On this date in 1944, a day after the historic Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino was bombed by Allied aircraft, the Germans launched their long-delayed counterattack on the Allied-held beachhead at Anzio, 35 miles south of the Italian capital, Rome. Just the month before, on January 22, American and British units…
Manila, Philippines · February 3, 1945 On this date in 1945, 35,000 soldiers of the U.S. Sixth Army under Lt. Gen. Walter Krueger, supported by 3,000 Filipino guerrillas, began entering Manila, capital of the Philippines, and soon liberated nearly 6,000 Allied and Filipino prisoners. Some of them, like the 64 U.S. Army nurses, were taken captive…
Near Holtzwihr, Colmar Area, Northeastern France · January 26, 1945 On this date in 1945 U.S. Army Second Lt. Audie Murphy, age 20, commanded an infantry company when it came under attack from 200 German infantrymen and a half-dozen Mark VI Tiger tanks on the outskirts of Holtzwihr (now part of Porte-du-Ried), a village near Colmar on the…